It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

I was working at about midnight the other night when I heard my little VPN app scream that it'd lost connection.. I noticed that I couldn't get out to my favorite site and checked my DSL modem.... the status light was off. So the next morning I got up and saw it was still off. I called the DSL provider, we went through the standard power off/on stuff and the regular checklist and the guy in India said he'd overnight a new modem (it still hasn't gotten here..). A little while later I remembered something from my CCNA 1 class - check "layer 1" first.

So I swapped out the line between the modem and the wall jack. The lights came back on. I took that phone line and tested it with a phone and it was bad... heh. Always check layer 1 first.

My two year cell phone contract with Verizon was up for renewal last week so I held my nose and signed up again. They have a great network where I am and most of my friends and family are on their network so calls to them don't count against my minutes. The sales people at the Verizon stores and kiosks around here have always been good to me and have been knowledgeable about the products they sell. Since I'm a Flash developer I'm also very interested in creating little Flash applications for delivery on cell phones (more about that later). That barely offsets my disgust with Verizon for crippling perfectly good phones. My last phone was the V710, which Verizon lost a class action lawsuit over for advertising that it had certain features that were in fact disabled by Verizon. The RAZR V3m that I picked up when I renewed my contract was designed to do some very cool things but the folks at Verizon figured they needed to disable them.

The feature that they disabled that really puzzles me? "Vibe then ring". That's my favorite setting when I'm out and about because most of the time I catch it before it rings.. but sometimes the vibrate isn't enough and I need the ring. But most of the features they disabled relate to getting things (mp3 files, photos, ringtones, etc) on and off the phone from a computer. And bluetooth features.. Most of those features were crippled (I'm assuming here..) to get people to sign up for the $15/month Vcast service that allows you to download ringtones, songs, and video (and other stuff).

Here's my response to that for those of you with RAZRs and are verizon customers:
How to view Youtube videos:
** watching videos will count against your minutes **
You need to have the $5 "mobile web" package to do this..
- Go to Menu>Get News & Info
- Select the Favorites tab
- Select Add Favorite
- Put "tinytube" in the Name box
- Put http://tinytube.net in the URL box
- Scroll down and select the Add button
Now when you go into your favorites you should see tinytube listed.
Once on the tinytube site you can select videos to watch. Start with the low bandwidth versions and see how it works. The higher bandwidth versions take much longer to download.
Here's a couple other links you can add into your favorites:
- http://www.google.com/gmm (google maps)
- mobile.google.com (will give you the option to search, map, mail, etc)

There are loads of other sites out there that give you tools similar to what Verizon wants you to pay $15/month for. So rather than subscribing to their Vcast service you can just get the $5 mobile web service and use what is freely available on the web.


One of the best features I had with my v710 was the ability to use it as a modem when I traveled a few times a year. The connection was slow, but it was fine for checking e-mail from the airport. I didn't use it enough to justify one of the wireless cards and the $60/month data plan, and using the v710 like this was in a "grey area" for Verizon. Some Verizon folks I talked to said it was fine since it just used my minutes up, while other Verizon folks said no way. Verizon has tried to put a stop to that with their new EVDO phones since the data connection is much faster and directly competes with their $60/month data plan.
It is very possible for you to use the V3m as a modem for your laptop. It might get your account cancelled (yes, you would need to pay the early termination fee) and other nasty stuff, but despite Verizon's best efforts it can be done and it's not too hard. Google for v3m tethering and/or DUN (dial up networking). Disabling EVDO on your phone before making the connection is the current trend to try to sneak under the radar.

You can dig around on the web and find all the info and software you need to re-enable the stuff that Verizon disabled on the V3m.. it can be fairly tricky.. or you can go to sites like
http://www.cellcables.com/motorola-v3m-razr-Verizon-usb-data-cable-drivers-software-free-ringtones-wallpapers.php
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZrwbarnes67QQhtZ-1
but be very careful.. making these changes may void warranties, may be against the service contract from Verizon, etc.. because doing this means you can do what the phone was designed to do for free but Verizon wants to charge you extra $ for.



Lots more info here http://mark.cdmaforums.com/V3C-1.htm

I finally got onto doing something about my e-mail situation this weekend. For ages I've had very little spam and have been using Eudora (when something has been working for you for 5+ years it's hard to switch) but lately the stock "pump and dump" spammers have been doing their best to annoy me. Since Qualcomm announced this thing about Eudora and I needed better filtering I decided to go ahead and switch over to Thunderbird.

But.. I didn't want to just have better filtering on my system.. I wanted the stuff filtered better before it got to my inbox. The problem was the spammers had gotten crafty and started training my SpamAssassin Bayesian filter to let their e-mails through as "ham". I needed a way to take the spam that slipped through and use it to retrain SA, but my web hosting provider didn't have a system set up to do that.

Here's what I found (I don't use Lunarpages, but was able to modify the script a little and get it working).

I also cleared out the existing Bayesian filter files from SA since they were totally overrun with false ham. The whitelist list was several hundred kb of addresses that the spammers had used in the past. blech!

Anyway, so far I like Thunderbird a lot.. and I'm already seeing spam getting caught by the SA Bayesian filter. Woohoo!

Oh.. I was in Washington, DC last week for meetings. That's why no blog posts from me. The meetings were productive and the Smithsonian air and space museum was awesome.